May 16 (Bloomberg) -- Creating aid corridors in Syria to
protect civilians from government troops or considering air
attacks on President Bashar al-Assad’s forces would be
“premature, to say the least,” U.S. Ambassador to the United
Nations Susan Rice said yesterday.

Often-raised solutions that entail resorting to the use of
force “are presented as if they are simple and without risk and
complexity,” Rice said at a luncheon at Bloomberg View. “I
think there are real challenges with humanitarian corridors, not
least of which is it entails boots on the ground and there is no
way around that.”

The 14-month-old conflict between the Assad regime and
opposition groups escalated this week, underscoring the failings
of the UN’s cease-fire plan and the inability of UN monitors to
curb the violence. Not long after reports that regime forces had
fired on mourners at a funeral, a roadside bomb yesterday ripped
through a convoy of cars ferrying UN monitors. No injuries were
reported, according to the UN.

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, became the latest
advocate for the creation of “safe zones” inside Syria. He
told Foreign Policy magazine on May 8 that humanitarian
corridors, which would have to be defended with military force,
are “a reality and worth the discussion.”

‘Grim’ Precedents

“The history of humanitarian corridors, Bosnia being a
recent example, is pretty grim,” Richard Gowan, associate
director for crisis diplomacy and peace operations at the New
York University Center on International Cooperation, said in a
telephone interview. “The reality is you either have to put so
much force in that it’s a de facto invasion or you send a
limited force that is inherently at risk.”

Rice, who said she did not discuss the details of his plan
with Kerry, gave a harrowing assessment of the direction of the
Syrian conflict.

“There is a risk it ends in more violence, which is why
the last peaceful game in town is one worth pursuing, even if
it’s a low-probability game, which we readily admit it is,”
Rice said.

While skeptical that the six-point plan put forward by Kofi
Annan, the UN special envoy, can restore peace, the alternative
to it is “certain Syrian, but also regional war.”

Unlike Libya, the U.S. and its allies have “a set of tools
that are more limited” to address the escalating violence in
Syria, according to Rice, a leading foreign policy voice in the
Obama administration. She listed all the ways in which the
circumstances in Syria differ from the North African country,
where Muammar Qaddafi was toppled in part by a NATO-enforced no-fly zone authorized by the UN.

Air Power

Air power is “something that we have been very concerned
about” there is not, as there was in Libya, a “coherent,
unified opposition on the ground that controls territory,” she
said.

Assad’s opponents are “clusters of local opposition that
aren’t coordinating with one another, not coordinating with
their external supporters and don’t control any territory,” she
said. Moreover, Syrian air defense is “exceedingly
sophisticated and dense,” making the situation “wholly
different” from Libya or the Balkans.

In 1993, the UN declared the largely Muslim Bosnian city of
Srebrenica a safe area, but in July 1995 a force of some 400
Dutch peacekeepers failed to prevent Serb forces from massacring
more than 8,000 people there. In March 1999, NATO started an
air campaign against Serb and Yugoslav targets that ended less
than three months later when Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic accepted peace terms.

‘Fraught, Fragile’

Located in the heart of the Middle East, with Turkey,
Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq as neighbors, Syria could “devolve
into even worse and more widespread violence that bleeds well
beyond the borders of Syria, as it’s beginning to do,” or there
will be “some political settlement, however fragile, fraught
and imperfect,” Rice said.

The Obama administration has raised its concerns about the
increasing violence in a conflict that by UN estimates already
has killed more than 9,000 people.

State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland said yesterday
that the Assad regime’s failure to abide by the cease-fire
engineered by Annan has deepened divisions within Syrian society
and allowed “spoilers” to infiltrate.

The regime’s unwillingness to stop “firing on its own
people” or pull its heavy weapons out of cities “has created a
climate where violence by other spoilers is increasingly
common,” Nuland said.

Climate of Violence

She said that the opposition groups that the U.S.
informally backs, such as the Syrian National Council, have
distanced themselves from events such as the double suicide
bombing in Damascus.

“This has been the concern all along, that the longer
Assad perpetrated violence himself, allowed and fostered a
climate of violence, the more folks that don’t have the best
interest of Syrians at heart would exploit that,” Nuland said.

Nuland said the monitors’ presence does lead to an ebb in
violence. “We see violence stop, we see peaceful demonstrations
begin again, we see people able to gather and talk about a
transition,” Nuland said. “But whenever monitors have to
leave, the violence resumes.”